Monday, November 16. 2009

Contrary to folk wisdom about the leopard being unable to change her spots, here in Cat Central we of course heed the fashion, and with the upcoming Winter, an upgrade to Snow Leopard seems very much the order of the day.

Except of course nothing ever goes smoothly.

Here are the notes from the front – unabridged and glossless admittedly not so much to provide an unadultered account but because I'm busy beating the doggone thing into submission. Maybe there is some truth to the whole static spots thing after all …

remove Magnifique, it's not compatible with snolo and will break it really badly – yeah, I learnt more about OS X single user than I ever cared to. As you know, Cmd-S at boot enter single user mode (and Alt gives a boot media selector!). But did you also know that you can't see the bloody DVD from within single user mode, and trying to mount it fails? So you know which files are broken in your install, you have them right there on the DVD, only you can't easily get to them. Oh, and trying to reinstall snolo fails on account of some printer driver suddenly, allegedly, having become unreadable. Hi Apple, where's skip this file in your install? Linux beats you and runs circles around you again – before the OS is even installed. Anyway, props for TimeMachine, at least that worked.
As for themes? Recent ThemePark should work, but I haven't tried it yet.

Next? switch ports to 64-bit, rebuild – if port install installed fails, building GIMP with the +animation variant is the next best thing to make world – it builds graphics libs, glib2, gtk2, video and sound libs thanks to the +animation variant, gzip, and even gcc43!

if xemacs freezes on start-up, gnuserv may be wonky. rename the binary, or - preferably - comment out (gnuserv-start) if you know where to find it in your per-user configuration. I built 21.5.x for Xft; I need to ask for a different font-size now to get the one I'm used to. Maybe it's this xemacs, maybe it's this Xft, maybe it's my build. Wev.

Update fink, if any. I'm a bit dispassionate on the "ports, or fink?" question these days. Recently, ports seemed to follow the Debian motto ("The oldest packages in the known world!"), while fink had more and more recent stuff, whereas after switching to snolo and 64-bit, ports hasn't failed me yet – at least in the sense that packages weren't there, or weren't recent; individual builds have failed (see above), but are being worked on. If you try your luck with fink first instead, I certainly won't hold it against you. Addendum: qt4-x11 in ports is old (4.4) and does not officially support 10.6. fink has it (qt4-x11 4.5.2) if you enable "unstable." This matters if you want amarok, as port only has amarok2 (which requires qt4) for X11. fink has both amarok and amarok2 (and a recent qt4), but its amarok2 is older than port's.Addendum: Built amarok 1.4; it builds, but doesn't work. Building amarok2 of course also doesn't work, but that's because qt4 pulls in strigi which doesn't work, and that's because the strigi build (from fink) finds cppunit (from ports), then runs tests I never wanted (for a library I don't intend to use, come to think of it), and barfs. Serves me right for letting fink see /opt/local while building, I suppose. However, the build also seems blissfully unaware of snolo's lack of an fdatasync() prototype, and since I do have a breaking point, I'm just faking it into §$%$%§ unistd.h for now, mapping it on fsync(). Disable kpac in kio. Barf City.

xbindkeys - so that in X11, Alt-F raises Firefox (the one running in Aqua), Alt-E raises emacs (running in X11), etc., and Alt-1..8 still go to the corresponding Aqua Spaces (while Alt-F1..12 go to the enlightenment ones)..

install DejaMenu - to put the application menu in a context-menu (Ctrl-Cmd-<), so we can auto-hide the silly menu-bar if we want. The 15" MBP has a pitiful resolution, so we'd better save screen estate!

I answered that, where did that go?
With the default install, backspace deleted (removed the character under the cursor, rather than the one to the left of it). This is surprisingly annoying, even for vi.

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